Grand Central: Original Stories of Postwar Love and Reunion

by Karen White

  For a long moment, Virginia stood there, absorbing the message. A father’s genuine tribute. A stranger’s gift of redemption.

  “Time for supper!” Bess announced, and the herd headed into the dining room.

  Mr. Bennett gazed at Virginia, awaiting her decision.

  She glanced at her travel bag, then back at Millie’s photo. The light in the girl’s eyes projected a look of hope that Virginia could not deny. “Sir,” she said finally, “I’d love to stay, if that’s still all right.”

  A smile widened the man’s lips. “We’d like that a lot.”

  —

  Around the table, and in chairs lining the dining room walls, the guests settled in their seats. Once the blessing was given and plates filled with food, stories about Millie began to flow.

  They were tales from her childhood, of “losing” her shoes in the creek when she preferred to go barefoot, and sneaking taffy from her father’s store, betrayed by her blue-stained teeth. Gradually they moved on to her teenage years, which few in town thought she would reach on account of her daring antics. She was fearless and fun, but also loyal and kind. Taking the fall for her younger brother, when the teacher raised a rod in punishment for a prank, served as one of many examples.

  Virginia had only intended to listen, but ultimately, with coaxing from Bess, she found herself describing a night involving a tad too much whiskey. Somehow Millie, Lucy, and Virginia had landed on a nightclub stage, belting out what was surely a ghastly version of “Straighten Up and Fly Right.”

  By the end of the evening, everyone in the room had laughed, more than half had dried their eyes. The pain was still there—how could it not be? But there was happiness, too, as Millie’s limited number of years on this earth did not reflect the fullness of her life.

  Best of all—perhaps from Bess’s smile that perfectly matched Millie’s, or from the regalement of so many tales, or maybe from all that love for a single person in one room—for those few hours around the table, it felt as if Millie herself was there.

  At the family’s insistence, Virginia agreed to stay overnight; the last bus for the day was long gone. But sleep, despite her exhaustion, did not come readily. She tossed and turned in the guest bed, the house now dark and still, until she realized what was left to do.

  With a flashlight from a kitchen drawer, Virginia tiptoed out of the house and made her way back to Millie’s grave. It was a moment for them alone. There Virginia sat, the cool grass beneath her, a milky moon shining down, and she whispered, “I miss you, Millie Bennett. I miss you so very much.”

  Yet even as she said this, pressing Millie’s photo to her chest, she understood that her friend would never truly be far away.

  —

  “We’re sure glad you came,” Mr. Bennett said the next morning as Virginia’s bus rolled up. “Promise you’ll keep in touch, now.”

  “I will,” she said with a smile. It was a promise she planned to keep.

  Once seated on the bus, she waved good-bye through the window and watched Millie’s hometown shrink from view. Although a single night could not entirely heal a wound, the rawness had notably lessened.

  She opened her purse to deposit change left from her fare, and again she spotted Taz’s letter. For the first time in months, she felt a desire—no, a need—to unfold the page. She ran her fingers over his words, hearing Taz speak them in her mind.

  My dearest V,

  I’m truly sorry for all you’ve gone through. If I knew how to stop you from hurting, I would do it in an instant. I can only tell you I love you. Please remember, no matter where our lives lead, you’ll always have a place in my heart.

  Yours always,

  Taz

  After all this time, he had every right to have moved on. Virginia had shut him out. Perhaps part of her, though irrationally, had even blamed him for the loss. Logic told her to let him be, that he deserved a girl who wasn’t tainted by tragedy. A clearheaded girl who, quite possibly, was already in his life.

  And yet, at the train station, instead of a ticket bound for New York, Virginia could purchase a trip headed south, back to Camp Davis, where Taz was stationed. Assuming he had not been transferred . . .

  No, it was foolish. Traveling all that way with so many factors unknown. Virginia shook off the idea. Writing a letter would be sensible. Or reaching him by phone. Even a telegram would be wiser. She hadn’t the faintest notion what she would say on paper, much less in person.

  But then, through the thought, another voice interrupted, familiar and strong.

  Trust your instincts, she heard Millie say. And only then did it occur to Virginia that maybe, all along, the advice was intended for more than flying.

  Tin Town

  AMANDA HODGKINSON

  Over seventy thousand British “GI brides” emigrated to the U.S. in the 1940s. The war brides, some of them as young as seventeen, left their homes and families behind knowing they might never see them again, and travelled to America in the brave pursuit of love. My short story “Tin Town” is humbly dedicated to these women.

  I didn’t look out of the window of the taxi when Mother told me to. Just like I hadn’t wanted to look earlier in the day when we stood on the deck of a ship carrying thousands of American servicemen home after the war, and had the first glimpse of the New York coastline rising like a hazy grey mist on the horizon.

  Mother sat beside me in the taxi, her head angled upwards, staring wide-eyed at the city, holding her hat as if she feared it might be blown away. Mrs. Lewis sat on the other side of me. She, too, urged me to look at the sights. She wanted me to see all the people walking the wide pavements. “I mean the sidewalk,” she corrected herself. She pointed out big motor cars and advertising billboards, the sky-high buildings, so tall they hid the sun, throwing shadows over the streets, all the metal fire escape balconies like jumbled birdcages hanging from their walls. I kept my head down and pretended not to be interested.

  “Spoilsport,” Mrs. Lewis said, jogging my shoulder in a familiar way. The way I knew, from growing up with five cousins, four of them boys, that siblings treated each other.

  “Don’t look then,” she said, sticking her tongue out. “Suit yourself.”

  Mrs. Lewis was often childish. She had been our travelling companion on the ship, sharing a cabin with us, spreading her clothes everywhere, washing her smalls in front of us and hanging them to dry over the bunks. Mrs. Lewis claimed us as family because she and Mother were both war brides. She was plain faced and had thick ginger hair, pin curled and worn in a low side parting. She wore far too much makeup, I thought. Her cheeks were pink and dusted with powder, her mascara-thick lashes black as tar. My cousin Susan had once read me a magazine article that said nice women should always strive for a natural beauty. Obviously Mrs. Lewis didn’t know this. She was very talkative, too, something else Susan’s magazine said a lady should never be. Mother insisted we make allowances for Mrs. Lewis. She’d grown up poor in a crowded tenement building, an east-end waif not quite seventeen and expecting a baby when she wasn’t much more than a child herself.

  “Cheerio for good, old London town,” Mrs. Lewis said gaily as the taxi took us on towards the train station. “So long and ta-ta for now. Molly, for goodness’ sake, I can’t believe your feet are that interesting. Look around you. Say hello to your new life. Say hello to New York.”

  I didn’t want to see New York. I didn’t want anything new. I wanted old. Every time I thought about how far we were from the farm, I felt my heart kick in panic, thumping my ribs like a rabbit caught in a poacher’s sack. Home was miles away now. Weeks away. Ship and train and bus journeys away. No, I would not look out of the window.

  “Let her alone, Betty,” said Mother, patting my hand. “I expect Jack will show us around when we’ve got over the journey.”

  Mrs. Lewis announced that this was a historic moment. A very import
ant day for us all. The day we finally put England behind us and began living in America. She could imagine herself in years to come, she said, as a very old lady, remembering all of this perfectly.

  I thought that when I was old I would remember our farm and the bedroom I shared with Susan, right up in the eaves of the house where swallows nested under the thatch. I would remember nights curled in Susan’s bed and the magazines she read. Stitchcraft and Screenland and Woman’s Own, the last having a weekly romance story that she liked to read out loud to me.

  I pulled my father’s wristwatch from my satchel. It was set on English time so I knew it was late afternoon back in the village. Clarkie would be having a tea break at the tannery, sitting on a barrel in the factory yard by the river, smoking a cigarette. Uncle Roger would be ploughing acres that had, until the end of the war this year, been home to a USAAF airfield and three thousand American airmen. I imagined the now abandoned control tower, the Nissen huts and empty hangars. With the men and their planes gone, Uncle Roger would be working a quiet day, seagulls chasing the tractor as he returned the wartime airfield to farmland. Aunt Marion might be peeling spuds in the farmhouse kitchen with Grandma, or collecting the eggs since Mother wasn’t there to do it anymore. Susan was probably out walking, pushing the ancient Silver Cross pram Clarkie had bought secondhand from the vicar’s wife.

  I pressed my father’s watch to my ear to hear its steady ticking, as if I could hang on to the English afternoon a little longer that way. I could picture Susan clearly. Her silky head scarf fluttering around her defiant face, her good tweed coat, brought out of its mothballs for the slight chill in the air on this late September day. I imagined the oak trees towering over the lane into the village, the crunch of acorns under the pram’s wheels. This was the lane where, when I was little, my father used to sit me up on the cart horse with him and we’d try and touch the curved ceiling of green leaves above our heads.

  There was a footpath leading off the lane which led to a ruined farm cottage where holly bushes grew over a running stream. It had been my father and Clarkie’s childhood haunt. Father had shown my mother this secret place when they were courting, proposing to her by the stream. Growing up I often played there, taking a few dolls with me for company.

  When the taxi stopped at the train station, I reluctantly slipped the watch into my schoolbag and got out of the car, helping Mrs. Lewis take the suitcases while Mother paid the driver.

  “This is not just any station,” Mother said. We looked up at the majestic building and its stone columns, tall and straight as woodland pines. Mother smiled at us. I knew she was trying to hide her nervousness. She had a small book open in her gloved hand, a guidebook Jack had sent. Her fingers trembled as she read from it. “This is Grand Central Terminal,” she said. “Isn’t it just splendid?”

  And it was. I had never seen so many people, nor a building so elegant and fine. The three of us in our dowdy, war-rationed clothes, all creased from too much time at sea, stood in what Mother said was the grand concourse. The marble floors gleamed under our travel-weary feet. Gigantic chandeliers of electric lights glowed golden as Christmas. The glass ticket booths had queues that merged into the thick shuffle of travellers. Railwaymen chalked up information boards. Cigarette smoke hung in thick clouds, and all around were voices echoing, trains being announced, exclamations, and chatter. How Jack was going to find us here in such noise and bustle, I had no idea.

  I stared up at a ceiling as high and heavenly as Ely Cathedral which I had once visited with Mother and Jack on a rare day out. If all the bustling crowds had stopped still for a moment and sung hymns together, their voices rising to the roof, then surely God would have heard us. Maybe Clarkie and Susan might have heard the sound, too, drifting on the wind across the ocean.

  I had loved singing hymns in our village church, standing beside Susan in the family pew. Susan was tone-deaf and only ever pretended to sing, opening and closing her mouth like a fish, trying to make me laugh. I thought of the overgrown churchyard, its ivy-covered stone walls and rickety wooden gate. The grass had been left to grow tall there during the war so it could be scythed and cut for hay, my father’s gravestone hidden in a feathery green meadow.

  The farther I got from home, it seemed the more I thought of it. Just then, all the bustle and movement of people rushing back and forth in the station reminded me of summer ants in our farmhouse kitchen, how they dashed around the sugar bowl, and Grandma in her jet-black mourning dress, like a giant queen ant herself, going at the little blighters with the flyswat.

  I felt so homesick that I began to cry. I hurriedly wiped my face with my sleeve. I was nearly twelve years old. I never cried. Never. I had to be strong for Mother.

  “I’m dying for a decent cup of tea,” said Mrs. Lewis, yawning and rubbing her back. “I’m gasping. I’d even drink coffee if that’s all there is.”

  Mother said we had to stand by the four-faced clock. That was where Jack was going to meet us. We huddled together while all around us were reunions. Soldiers and airmen came and went. They swaggered and joked, and Mrs. Lewis said they were heroes, thanks be to God and bless the memory of the ones who hadn’t come back. She stared at a group of young women near us. I thought Mother might tell her it was rude to gawp, but I couldn’t take my eyes off them, either. Bright as butterflies, the women had jauntily angled hats, patterned dresses, fur collars and satin coat linings, high heels, and seamed stockings. They danced into the outstretched arms of returning soldiers who lifted them up and waltzed them away. Even in their finery, none of the women were as beautiful as my mother. In her flat lace-up brogues and her dull brown felt hat with its pheasant feathers quite broken, Mother was still the prettiest English rose in the whole of New York.

  “What on earth will Jimmy think when he sees me?” Mrs. Lewis wailed. “I’ve not changed my clothes in days. I’d say the porters here are better dressed than me.”

  “Jimmy will think you are blooming,” said Mother, who was always kind. “You’ll dazzle him, Betty. You’ll see.”

  Mrs. Lewis was what Grandma would call down at heel. On the ship, Mother had darned and mended Betty Lewis’s clothes, yet she still looked shabby. She was heavy with child and waddled when she walked, leaning backwards with her hand pressing into the small of her back. In her grey swing coat with its big shoulder pads and her round straw hat perched on her curls, Mrs. Lewis looked like a handbell, swinging back and forth.

  I hoped I might be as kindhearted as Mother one day. And that I might begin to look like her and gain in prettiness. Mrs. Lewis had pointed out I must take after my father with my boyish freckles and fawn-coloured hair cut in a short bob. Mother had promised I could grow my hair once we were settled in New York. We would have a dog, too, because we’d had to leave my father’s old sheepdog behind. Jack had a house out in a place called Woodside-Winfield, and it had a garden front and back. Plenty of space, Jack said, for a family dog. According to his letters, which Mother read parts of to me, I was going to make a whole heap of friends when I started school. I’d learn to love baseball and I’d spend my Saturday mornings at the movies. Jack was going to buy me pretzels and egg creams and take me to the corner candy store. He would get me Kewpie dolls and paper dolls to play with. I told Mother I’d rather watch cricket on the village green, and even though I loved the idea of paper dolls, I insisted I was too old for that kind of thing. It was cruel of me to be so rough with their dreams, but Mother said nothing. She folded the letter away and her smile went with it, tucked back into the envelope, placed into the bundle of correspondence tied with a ribbon. She suggested we think of a name for the dog when we got it.

  “Imagine if our husbands don’t come?” said Mrs. Lewis. Her brown eyes were glassy with tears. “What will we do?”

  She’d been asking that question since we met her. On the long boat journey, lying seasick in our bunks, Mrs. Lewis had cried most days worrying about whether her Ji
mmy would be here to meet her.

  “Now, Betty,” said Mother. “Jimmy has probably been counting the days until he sees you. You’re his wife. He’s going to be a father, after all.”

  “That’s the problem.” Mrs. Lewis put her hand on her belly and lowered her voice. “It wasn’t planned, you know. This was a mistake.”

  “Jimmy has responsibilities,” soothed my mother. “He’ll honour them, I’m sure.”

  “If he doesn’t, I’ll have to go back to London. I couldn’t stand that. Think of the sorry looks I’d get in the neighbourhood. ‘Poor cow,’ they’ll say. ‘On her own with a kid, rejected by her GI husband . . .’”

  I thought I would go home under any kind of circumstances, even if it hadn’t been the happiest of homes we’d left behind. After my father died, Uncle Roger found it difficult to run the farm without him. Then there had been the upset with Susan. I had caused that. But still, the farm was home. It was all I had ever known, and I missed it terribly.

  “We’re at the mercy of our husbands,” said Mrs. Lewis. “Look at you, Irene. You say Jack loves you, but what if he’s changed his mind since you last saw him? You’ve come all this way trusting a wedding ring bought in a hurry. You’ve got a one-way ticket to New York, a suitcase, and a few dollars in your purse, that’s all.”

  Mother said she also had me. Her daughter. I stood a little straighter and linked arms with Mother, glad we were briefly united against Mrs. Lewis and her constant complaining.

  “Not much to start a new life on though, is it,” Mrs. Lewis replied. “And what if your Jack gets fed up with Molly and wants to send her back? What will you do then? This is their country, not ours.”

  Grandma had voiced the same concerns when Mother first announced we were emigrating. In the late spring of this year we’d been to London to have medical examinations and an interview at the embassy for our visas, and Grandma had said she would not let Jack adopt me. Mother could marry her Yank and live in America if she wanted but she could not take me with her.